Books like Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman

A.J.P. Taylor is a concise writer, and not without wit. I was so pleased with his The Hapsburg Monarchy: 1809-1918 that I wanted to read more. This Bismarck biography has been in my sights for some time. In it he compresses that Great White Male stateman’s eventful life to less than 300 pages. What you get mostly is the broad strokes. Did you know he sobbed a lot? It’s true. Born an impoverished Junker in Schönhausen, he cared nothing for the people, much less so-called great men. He was a family man, but beyond it he was a loner who believed that he was the greatest of men. He had no ideology only goals. He wrote beautifully. He disdained intellectuals in politics. He worked William I like a room. He did much to ensure long-term peace in the region, even if it bored him to tears. He created modern Germany almost by sheer force of will. He was without outside interests, friends, passions, unless we count Katherine Orlov, wife of the Russian ambassador, but their meetings at Biarritz were few and she died young. With William II’s accession to the throne—the same fellow who abdicated in 1918—Bismarck went out on a not surprising wave of hubris; this was 1890. He had cultivated relationships only within the context of power. When he was out of power he had no support base to fall back on. Nor could he let go. He criticized goverment from a Hamburg newspaper, further alienating the powers that be. That’s the gist. How nice it would be if more biographies could be so unstuffed and unstuffy. Now it’s on to the same author’s The Course of German History.